Schools, businesses to deal with Toyota loss

Hideaki Matsushita, owner and chef of Matsuya Japanese Restaurant and Market, Florence, said transfers from the local Toyota facility could reduce his business 15 to 20 percent.
(Photo:
The Enquirer/Patrick Reddy
)

ERLANGER – When Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America came to Erlanger in 1996, the company didn’t just bring hundreds of jobs and tax revenues to the region.

Toyota became the benchmark by which corporate involvement was measured in Northern Kentucky, helping underwrite everything from symphony concerts to partnering with United Way on a variety of initiatives. The company’s employees also became active volunteers, especially in local schools.

Tuesday, Toyota representatives reached out to some of those community partners, letting them know that it will continue to be “business as usual” for the foreseeable future, said Helen Carroll, community relations manager for Toyota.

In the Erlanger-Elsmere Independent School District, for example, Toyota has sponsored the bornlearning Academy promoting early childhood development, said Superintendent Kathy Burkhardt. Toyota employees working through the Northern Kentucky Education Council also have spent several years helping individual students with reading, and Toyota has contributed financially to professional development and other educational programs, she said.

“You always hate to see a great community partner like that leave the area,” Burkhardt said. “Toyota has helped the entire region.”

“For now, we’ll continue on as we have,” Carroll said of Toyota’s corporate involvement. “We are working on a plan that will come a little later, and we will continue to have conversations with our community partners in the days ahead.”

Tuesday, Carroll notified Jess Dykes, spokeswoman for the Kenton County School District, that Toyota’s bornlearning academies at Caywood and Beechgrove elementaries will not be affected by Toyota’s planned move. The bornlearning Academies are a statewide initiative funded out of Toyota’s Georgetown location, not Erlanger, Carroll said.

Toyota also will continue to take part in the BEST (Business Education Success Teams) program, a school-business partnership sponsored by the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Carroll said.

“Toyota has been fantastic for education,” Dykes said.

According to the most recent Census Bureau figures, Japanese residents represent 1 percent of the 113,000 residents in the Boone County School District.

In Boone County Schools’ Mann Elementary, where 6 percent of the student body is of Asian descent, welcoming and directional signs in Japanese were placed in the building this school year, Principal Connie Crigger said. The school also is teaching Japanese to pupils in kindergarten through grade 5.

“We have a fair number of Japanese students, so our (site based) school council decided to go with that language as part of our world language program,” Crigger said.

Although there’s no way to know how many of Mann Elementary’s pupils have parents who work at Toyota, Crigger said she will be sad to see any students leave when Toyota moves its operations out of Northern Kentucky in a few years.

“They’ve been hard working students, and their parents are very committed to education,” Crigger said.

Meanwhile, Erlanger city officials will start discussing how to deal with the impending loss of that city’s largest employer at the regular staff meeting this week, City Administrator Marc Fields said. Erlanger will lose about $1.3 million from its $16 million budget when Toyota moves, and local officials will have to look at ways to make up that revenue, if those jobs aren’t replaced.

Dealing with the loss of Toyota by 2017 will be “the city’s main topic of conversation in the year to come,” Fields predicted.

Local businesses also will have to grapple with Toyota’s impending move.

Those include Jo An Japanese restaurant near Toyota’s Erlanger headquarters, which opened 17 years ago after Toyota came to Northern Kentucky, owner Hiroshi Tajima said. He expects to lose at least 35 percent of his business when Toyota moves.

Hideaki Matsushita, owner of Matsuya Japanese Restaurant in Florence, estimates in January 1998, 10 to 20 percent of his business will disappear.

“Losing a business with about 1,600 people is going to have an economic impact on anybody who has a business in Erlanger, but some more than others,” said Michele Colangelo, general manager of Super Bowl Erlanger. During the past year, Toyota has booked about six corporate outings at the bowling alley just off I-75 across from the Erlanger city building.

“Employers come and go, but it usually doesn’t happen in such big numbers,” said Jim Ferrari, owner of Tsunami Sushi in Erlanger. Two years from now, if people are doing their due diligence, I think they’ll have a company or companies in place to go into (Toyota’s) building. But as a business owner, knowing that Toyota is moving, I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to up my game in the next two years.”⬛